While working on the last tedious chores in connection with ELLERY QUEEN: THE ART OF DETECTION, which will come out in January, I expected to devote my final column of the year to someone besides EQ. Almost anyone. But back in October Joseph Goodrich — a name you’re familiar with if you read this column regularly — emailed me a long document consisting of a large number of letters from Manny Lee to Fred Dannay that for space and other reasons he hadn’t included in BLOOD RELATIONS, his collection of the correspondence between the cousins whose byline was Ellery Queen.

Many of these letters were undated, those that had dates were often out of chronological order, typos abounded, but — Wow! For the next few weeks I alternated between slogging away at the ART OF DETECTION index and working on the Lee document: reorganizing, trying to date the letters that were dateless, adding material in brackets to explain (where I could) who or what Manny was talking about, doing pretty much the same things Joe Goodrich himself had done so well in BLOOD RELATIONS.

One item I discovered I was able to work into the text of my book at the last minute. The earliest letter in the document dates from very late 1940. Fred Dannay had recently been discharged from the hospital after suffering serious injuries in an auto accident. Manny’s letter mentions that among the people who had called asking about Fred was one Laurence Smith, whom he identifies as the ghost writer behind the then recently published novelization based on the movie ELLERY QUEEN, MASTER DETECTIVE (1940).

Laurence Dwight Smith (1895-1952) has long been forgotten but a few minutes with Google brings him back to life. Under his own name he wrote four or five whodunits, several mystery/adventure books for young adults, and a few nonfiction books like CRYPTOGRAPHY: THE SCIENCE OF SECRET WRITING (1943) and COUNTERFEITING: CRIME AGAINST THE PEOPLE (1944). His short story “Seesaw” was one of the first originals to be published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (July 1942). What else he may have written under other bylines, or even whether he ghosted the other EQ movie novelizations, THE PENTHOUSE MYSTERY (1941) and THE PERFECT CRIME (1942), remains unknown.

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It’s long been known that Fred Dannay devised the plots for the Ellery Queen novels, stories and radio dramas and Manny Lee did the actual writing — and also that at a certain point in the nine-year life of the radio series Fred, whose wife had been diagnosed with cancer that eventually (on July 4, 1945) killed her, couldn’t perform his function any longer.

Exactly when that happened would remain unclear today except for the Lee document. In a letter written on June 30, 1948, shortly after the Queen radio program was cancelled, Manny mentions that he had taken over the series “in January of 1944, when you dropped out of active work.” For most of that year, Manny reminds Fred, he made do by recycling 30-minute scripts from earlier seasons and condensing some of the original 60-minute scripts (1939-40) to half-hour length.

Eventually, Manny says, he “began doing originals from bought material.” When? In October 1944, at the start of the program’s fifth season. Does this mean that every new weekly episode from then on was based on a plot synopsis by someone other than Fred? Not at all! Manny’s correspondence with Anthony Boucher informs us that Fred was several synopses ahead of schedule at the time he dropped out.

These Manny squirreled away and fleshed out into scripts over the next two years, the last one (“The Doomed Man”) being broadcast late in August 1946. But most if not all of the new scripts for the fifth season were probably based on “bought material.”

Bought from whom? For the first several months of the new regime, the plots were devised by a long forgotten scribe named Tom Everitt. Even in the age of the Internet almost nothing is known about this man, but we know a great deal about what Manny thought of him because his letters to Boucher are full of snarky remarks about Everitt’s competence and character. On May 24, 1945, he described himself as “hating [Everitt’s] smug, treacherous guts” and Everitt’s recent plot synopses as “sloppier…even than usual….”

His letters to Fred Dannay in the Lee document offer more of the same. On November 4, 1947, he called Everitt “a son-of-a-bitch” who at the rate of $400 per synopsis got “tremendously overpaid” even though “the bulk of the creative work was done by me, out of sheer necessity….[Y]ou don’t know the things…that bastard has been saying and is still saying in the advertising business about his ‘part’ in the Queen show. There is no protection against his kind of conscienceless and unscrupulously shrewd self-propaganda….”

Manny would love to have worked exclusively with Boucher but Tony was unable to come up with complex Ellery Queen plots on a one-a-week basis and Manny had no choice but to continue buying from Everitt until late in the program’s radio life.

At least 33 of the Queen scripts between January 1945 and September 1947 came from Everitt raw material and are identified as such in my book THE SOUND OF DETECTION (2002). Most of the scripts between October 1944 and mid-June 1945, when the first episode based on a Boucher plot was broadcast, were probably derived from Everitt too. “Cleopatra’s Snake” (October 12 and 14, 1944) finds Ellery as backstage observer at a live production of ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA for experimental TV when the genuine poisonous snake being used in the death scene (yeah, right) bites to death the actress playing Cleopatra.

In “The Glass Sword” (November 30 and December 2, 1944) Ellery tackles the case of the circus sword swallower who died when the sword in his stomach broke while the lights were out. These concepts strike me as way too wacko to have come from the mind of Fred Dannay. Therefore they almost certainly came from Everitt.

The vast majority of Everitt-based EQ episodes have never been published as scripts and don’t survive on audio. But it now seems quite possible that one of them was mistaken for a Dannay-based episode and published a few years ago — as the title story in the collection THE ADVENTURE OF THE MURDERED MOTHS (Crippen & Landru, 2005). The episode with that title was broadcast on May 9, 1945. The plot is nowhere near as off-the-wall as those of “Cleopatra’s Snake” or “The Glass Sword” and therefore might be one of those Fred completed before he left the series. We just don’t know. Maybe we never will.

8 Responses to “Mike Nevins on ELLERY QUEEN.”

Mike, I’ve always thought that as a researcher of mystery/film lore, you’re our equivalent of Indiana Jones. As the year draws to a close, I want to thank you for the years of fascinating reading your patience and insight have given me.

Given BLOOD RELATIONS’ tight focus, there wasn’t room for all the material I transcribed at Columbia University, and I hope that at least some of it can be used in ELLERY QUEEN: THE ART OF DETECTION. The unedited and uncorrected transcriptions runs to several hundred thousand words, a portion of which, suitably proofed and edited, I used in BR.

I—and a lot of other EQ readers—hungrily await your new tome. You’re a champ, Mike. Thanks for all you do.

I’m really looking forward to ELLERY QUEEN: THE ART OF DETECTION too! It should be fascinating.

Had no idea that “The Adventure of the Murdered Moths” might not really be by the whole EQ team.

Here is what I wrote in my EQ article (based on the idea the tale is genuine EQ):

“The Adventure of the Murdered Moths” (1945) investigates a crime scene, using some clever scientific ideas to interpret the history of the killing. It is a story in the tradition of “The Two-Headed Dog” (1934), “The Seven Black Cats” (1934) and “The Hollow Dragon” (1936). As in those tales, investigating the mystery surrounding the title animals proves more central to the puzzle plot, than the actual whodunit parts of the mystery. The tale shares a nocturnal, roadside cabins setting with “The Two-Headed Dog”. The villain’s motive, and relationship to the victims, is similar to that in “The Seven Black Cats”, and once again, it proves to be a surprising alternative to more obvious motives of other characters in the story. And like the short tales, “The Adventure of the Murdered Moths” opens in cozy surroundings, here the restaurant, before moving on to creepier crime scenes.

The puzzle about the moths is less purely absurd, baffling and incomprehensible in its initial appearance, than the title puzzles in the earlier stories, and this separates this tale from its predecessors.

There might be a few here who’ll disagree with you on the merits of EQ’s mystery fiction, especially when it comes to its appeal to contemporary readers (or not), but on this blog you’re preaching mostly to the choir, Bill.

We had a long discussion about this following one of Mike Nevins’ earlier columns:

That’s why I named checked Christie.To comtemporary readers EQ would be hostoricals, ingeniously bending the contours of classic mystery fiction.I work at BN and we have Fu Manchu, Shadow, and Doc Savage. I know these are more “pulp”, but there’s a market. At least put EQ on e-books…

Between Mike’s and Joe’s separate work on Queen, a wealth of information has opened up to us and we are all grateful to them for their efforts. I really appreciated Joe’s Blood Relations (see my review in a recent issue of Deadly Pleasures) and look forward immensely to Mike’s Art of Detection. Thanks to both of you.

Steve, your reference in #5 to the previous discussion took me back to reread it, and I realized I had missed the last few additions to it. I want to correct any impression that I found the EQ books and stories badly written. In fact, I think they are very well written and that Dannay and Lee were seriously concerned with literary style. My point about changing fashions was simply that they were sometimes a little ornate for contemporary readers, but a slightly (or even very) old-fashioned style has not kept us from enjoying many writers of classic literature.
One added note on the Dannay-Lee correspondnce. I don’t know if it’s in the same letter Mike Nevins refers to, but during Dannay’s recuperation from his accident, Lee sent him a letter imploring him to take it easy and assuring him everything was being taken care of. He said with surprise that Lowell Brentano sent Fred his good wishes. Brentano had collaborated with the Queen team on a stage play and apparently it had not been a happy collaboration. That’s from memory–I don’t think I took any notes on the letter.
Any scholar of mystery fiction, especially in the New York area, should be aware of the Dannay archive at Columbia University, which includes fascinating correspondence from most of the famous writers who contributed to EQMM over the years. Arthur Vidro has been mining this material for some articles in GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME DETECTION.